How can a marginalized body carve out a space for freedom amidst symbolic annihilation? To answer this question, Marcus R. Pyle looks to the femme fatale as a trope of artistic production and social culture during the turn of the twentieth century. The femme fatale—the hypersexual, mysterious, magnetic, and "dangerous" woman—was the enemy of the fin de siècle. Ultimately, she functions as a trope who is a catalyst that contributed to the erosion and fracture of musical form that characteri...